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Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Setting Goals or Enjoying Life?

I was thinking this morning, as you do, about how I never seem to get caught up on the washing up and the washing in my household of 6 people. It tends to create a continual feeling of angst and resentment towards my family because I never reach my goal of finishing. I am not the sort of person who just enjoys the rhythms of life and goes with the flow, finding contentment not in completing a goal, but in doing what needs to be done in each moment.

I am wondering if this is a modern problem. We are taught to set goals, to work out how to achieve them, and to work on them in little steps until we reach them. The problem is that some things in life don't fit this type of thinking. Making a home, building a family, creating relationships... all of these do not sit well with the modern goal approach. Maybe I am missing out on the day to day peace of living in each moment, doing what needs to be done, and not trying to achieve some goal just because I am told I "must" set goals to be a success.

In fact I read recently that not everyone who is successful did set goals. In some cases it was more a case of the successful person enjoying what they did so much that they spent a lot of time doing it, learning to better, and by virtue of time they became successful in their area of life. Most of these type of successful people will keep working in their area of interest until they die, or find a new interest. They will never reach their goals, because they know how to enjoy what they are doing with their life. And really isn’t enjoyment of life a much better "goal" than a certain amount of money, or a certain size portfolio, or a certain amount of fame?

Maybe that is something I should consider in those areas of my life that do not fit well with the "goal setting" paradigm. Enjoy what I do, learn to do it better if I am interested, and just keep moving forward.
(Originally posted May 2010 on old blog)

1 comment:

I know exactly how you feel... right now I should be doing my dishes and laundry but I have decided to enjoy the quiet of the house (everyone is asleep) and just take an hour out to catch up on some reading and encouragement. I guess it is easy to be overwhelmed when there all ways seems so much to do. As for me I do the dishes at the end of the evening so that I get up to a clean kitchen every morning and just before I go to bed I put on a load of washing. At 4.00pm just before Dad is due home I call everyone together and we have a tidy up ... toys put away etc, etc... you do need some plan/goals to help you every day and a good song on the cd player played loud always helps me along. sometimes I set the timer for 15 minutes just to see what I can get done in that time. Have a good weekend

I am a mum of 4 young men who challenge me in many ways as I homeschool them and try to keep my home happy.
I like the principles of a literature based education with a whole lot of real life thrown in and believe in individualising my methods and even curriculum for each child as needed.
I try to remember that the blogging lens can be very good at showing only rainbows and not the mud that naturally comes with the rain. Here you will read about the real days of homeschooling too.

Great Quotes

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each. - Plato

Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. - Aristotle